Google’s John Mueller has advised that the new inspect URL tool in Search Console is only useful for webpages.
This information was provided to an SEO on Twitter who was concerned about errors showing up when inspecting images, CSS, and JavaScript resources.
Search Console’s inspect URL tool provides results that reflect how Google would index a URL if it was a web page.
Since images, CSS, and JavaScript resources are not webpages, the inspect URL tool will not provide any useful information for them.
The Inspect URL tool is only useful for webpages, so if you inspect images, CSS, JS, etc — then the results there wouldn’t be as useful (they’d reflect how we would index it if it were a web page, which they aren’t).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 8, 2019
For further clarification, the SEO provided a screenshot of an error returned when testing an image URL he knows is indexable.
In response, Mueller said that’s fine since images are not indexed in regular web search results.
Images aren’t indexed in web-search, so that would be fine.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 8, 2019
Google Search Console’s updated inspect URL tool has only been out for less than a month, so it may take some time to fully understand its capabilities and limitations.
Concerns like this one are likely to arise, and it’s good to see representatives from Google providing feedback.
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